DIANA MARKOSIAN, INVENTING MY FATHER
Willamette Week, Oregon
Jan 14 2015
Traveling to Armenia to reconnect with an absentee father.
Diana Markosian’s father would fit well in an Everclear song. During
her childhood, he would vanish without explanation for months at a
time, then return as if nothing had happened. His stormy relationship
with her mother ended when her mother fled to the United States
from Moscow, taking the then-7-year-old Markosian and her brother
to California. They never told her father goodbye and didn’t see him
again for 15 years. Her mother painstakingly cut his image out of every
picture in which he appeared in the family photo album–a detail that
adds poignancy to Markosian’s new photo series, Inventing My Father.
In 2013, Markosian flew to Armenia to reunite with her father, an
event she documented in black-and-white portraits and still lifes.
Because he had been a cipher to her during all the intervening years,
the experience of visiting him was not so much “getting to know you”
as it was inventing him from scratch: inferring the contours and
features of a phantom. From these untitled photographs, you can sense
how surreal the experience must have been for Markosian. In one image,
the man gazes at the camera through two windows, the glass panes blurry
with reflections and glare. Knowing the backstory, it’s impossible
not to see these distortions as metaphors for the time and distance
that have warped the man’s image in his daughter’s mind.
Another photo shows one of the man’s shirts on a hanger in the dying
light of early evening–an empty garment filled only with shadows. In
another dramatically lit shot, the man sits on his sofa, his white hair
aglow in sunlight, his face and torso completely obscured by shadow.
To the artist’s credit, she allows these multiple layers of meaning
to play out gently. She doesn’t hit you over the head with treacly
symbolism; she doesn’t need to. As a subject, her father doesn’t give
much. If he has a personality, he’s keeping it very close to his vest.
You get the sense that Markosian still harbors a good deal of anger
toward him but is doing her damnedest to understand and forgive–hoping
that just maybe, all these photographs might begin to fill up the
hole his absence left inside her.
SEE IT: Blue Sky Gallery, 122 NW 8th Ave., 225-0210. Through Feb. 1.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-23816-diana_markosian_inventing_my_father.html